Email Forwarding & Escalations

Overview

Email Forwarding & Escalations allow platform users and even non-users to receive email notifications triggered by incoming messages from contacts. There are three main reasons why we might escalate questions to your staff:

1. The information needed to answer is not something we can find.
   At Mainstay, we never want to guess when providing an answer to a contact. If a contact asks a question for which your organization has no answer in the Knowledge Base, it can be escalated to a staff member. In many instances, this can be a learning opportunity for the bot. (See Knowledge Maintenance.)
2. The contact has a need that deserves personal attention.
   Contacts often develop a personal connection with our chatbots, and this means that sometimes they share a lot. If a user is struggling with a situation of personal nature or is giving a lot of information about a specific situation, it may be best to escalate the message to a staff member so that student can discuss the challenges they're facing. Sometimes a student is just asking for human help!
3. Sensitive situations.
   It's rare that a contact would send a message of a sensitive nature or requiring immediate intervention. These could include messages about an emergency or a threat to harm themselves or others. In order to respond quickly in these situations, we recommend Automatic Escalations.

Email

The email recipient will get a message from Mainstay that includes:

• Message Preface: for Manual Forwarding, a message from the staff member escalating this message.
• {Name} has a question: the particular message that triggered this escalation
• Contact number: the phone number of the contact
• Click here to reply: a button to respond to the message from email, without opening the Mainstay platform (marked in red in the screenshot below)
• Contact Information: additional contextual information, such as the name, email address, communication channel, and CRM ID of the contact, as well as a link to the Conversation in Mainstay
• Chat History: the back-and-forth for this particular escalation instance
• Custom Fields: additional data from the contact's custom fields, configured in the Contact Fields Manager
• Message logs: several recent messages from the conversation prior, to provide important context

Settings Page

To configure these settings, click the gear icon in the side bar and then select "Email Forwarding & Escalations", or visit https://app.mainstay.com/settings/escalation.

Trusted Email Domains

To prevent spam and unauthorized users, enter one or more trusted email domains. When adding email recipients (below), their email address will be validated against these domains. Additionally, responses to Escalations Emails will only be accepted if the sender matches one of these domains.

• To add a domain, type it into the box and click Add.
• To remove an existing domain, click the Remove button next to it.
• Note that it is not possible to remove the mainstay.com domain.

If your email server filters incoming messages, make sure to add sender noreply@mainstay.com and IP address 192.254.116.209 to your allowlist.

Allowed Emails

In this section, you can configure which email addresses are available for both Manual Forwarding and Automatic Escalations.

To add an email recipient, click Add Email. This opens an overlay modal:

• Name is for displaying this recipient in lists and rules.
• Email is the actual email address that messages will be sent to.
• Show in lists? is used to determine if an email recipient is included in the Conversations page when manually forwarding a contact's message.
• Reason is shown when manually forwarding a contact's message. This is because the platform user who is manually forwarding a message may not know the exact name or email address of the intended recipient. For example, if the incoming message is about technical issues, the user may not know to forward it to James specifically, so this Reason can help identify the right recipient.
• Click Save to add this email recipient to the list.

• To edit this information for an existing Allowed Email, click the pencil icon.
• To delete an existing Allowed Email, click the trashcan icon.

Email Forward Suggestions

Platform users on the Conversations page can select any incoming message and manually escalate it to an email recipient. (See Manually Forward a Message in Conversations.) This is useful when the contact has a specific question or situation that requires a subject matter expert, who may not even be a Mainstay platform user.

To add a new rule, click Add Rule. This opens an overlay modal:

• Audience allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts who meet certain criteria. (See Creating Audiences for more information.)
• Geo-matching Conditions allow you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts whose default geography fields place them within the region specified: State, County, or Zip Code.
• Email is the actual email address that messages will be sent to. There can be only one recipient.
• Escalation rule name is shown when manually forwarding a contact's message. If a contact meets the Audience criteria and Geo-matching Conditions, this recipient will be the top suggestion shown.
• Click Save to add this rule to the list.

• To edit an existing rule, click the edit pencil icon in that row.
• To delete an existing rule, click the trashcan icon in that row.
• A contact may meet the criteria for more than one Email Forwarding rule. To change the priority that determines which rule is suggested, click the up and down arrows.
• Note that the final rule, "If nothing else matches", is required. If the contact does not match the criteria from any of the preceding rules, this email recipient will be suggested instead.

Automatic Email Escalation

Incoming messages (outside of campaigns/scripts and Live Chat) are automatically interpreted by the AI and associated with a particular Knowledge Base understanding. If no understanding is a close enough match, a Fallback Response is sent instead.

This same identification can be used to automatically escalate messages to email recipients when the incoming message matches a particular understanding or Fallback.

To add a new rule, click Add Rule. This opens an overlay modal:

• Understanding allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to incoming messages that match to a particular understanding (or one of a group of understandings). These understandings can be content created by your organization or built-in by default; they can even be sensitive words, such as a contact saying "die" within any message. They can even be Fallbacks. (See below.)
• Audience allows you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts who meet certain criteria. (See Creating Audiences for more information.)
• Geo-matching Conditions allow you to filter this rule so it only applies to contacts whose default geography fields place them within the region specified: State, County, or Zip Code.
• Email is the actual email address that messages will be sent to. There can be only one recipient.
• Escalation rule name is shown in this list.
• Click Save to add this rule to the list.

• To edit an existing rule, click the edit pencil icon in that row.
• To delete an existing rule, click the trashcan icon in that row.
• A contact may meet the criteria for more than one Automatic Escalation rule. To change the priority that determines which rule is triggered (and thus which recipient the message is sent to), click the up and down arrows.

Escalating Fallback Responses

In addition to regular Knowledge Base understandings, it is also possible to trigger Automatic Escalations on Fallback responses (formerly "IDK" or "I don't know" responses). These can be searched like any other understanding, and may appear as PSEUDO_TOPIC.

Helpful Tips

• Escalation emails can be forwarded to other staff members, who can reply directly to a contact, as long as their email address is within an allowed domain.
• If you want to escalate to an entire group, we recommend using Google Groups or an equivalent "listserve" email address. Mainstay will send the escalation email to that group (for example, support@college.edu), and all members of that group will receive a copy of the email and be able to respond. However, Mainstay will not be able to inform other members of the group when one member has responded to an escalation.
• Give your Forwarding Suggestion and Automatic Escalation rules descriptive names so that you can easily tell which situations they are for.
• One Automatic Escalations rule can contain multiple understandings / topics.
• Use the box-and-arrow links to view Audiences and understandings to verify your selections.
• Remember, when an understanding is included in an Automatic Escalation rule, the email recipient will receive a notification every time the AI matches to this understanding (for contacts who meet the filtering criteria).
• Once the contact receives a response from an escalation, they will be given the opportunity to reply. If they do, it will trigger another escalation to the same recipient. Otherwise, the contact will resume their conversation with the bot.
• See Recommendations for more.
• Scripts (which can be used in Campaigns, #Commands, Web-chat Intro, and more) can also trigger email notifications. See Script Actions for more information.